O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [58]
He almost crowed at his cleverness, restored to his sense of worth by having pitted himself against a superior force and decisively won the day, and it dawned on me that Mahmoud’s air of indulging a child’s entreaty, when we had first been pinned down in the wadi, was part and parcel of the affair. By pretending to deprecate Ali’s dangerous, difficult, and life-saving act as a childish trick when we all knew the immense skill and nerve it had required, he was allowing Ali to flaunt his own feat as a game—neither man would have permitted himself the undignified braggadocio of mere pride.
I laughed aloud in pleasure at the analysis, and at the delicious complications to be found in human intercourse; Ali turned his head and laughed with me.
We did not bother with the tents that night, merely wrapping ourselves in abayyas and rugs for a few brief and very cold hours. The night was still inky overhead, spangled with the intricate spray of a million pure, bright stars, when Ali’s tea-making sounds began. Wrapped tightly inside my rug, I sat more or less upright and huddled near the small fire, my breath coming out in clouds before my face. When we started off I retained my rug, only returning it to the mule’s pack when the sun had come up in our faces.
Over breakfast, which as usual was eaten in the late morning, I asked Holmes for the map I knew he had secreted somewhere in the folds of his robe. I ignored Ali’s ostentatious display of checking the countryside for onlookers, as we had seen perhaps three human beings all morning (and those miles away) and I took the small folded paper Holmes handed me, spreading it out on my knees.
With some effort (the map was both small and highly detailed) I traced our path out of Beersheva, through the Wadi Estemoa, up to a nameless square indicating the village, down into the other wadi where we had been set upon by a thief, and then straight east to where we now sat. I saw that in a short time we should come to Masada, or Sebbeh as the map had it, Herod’s hilltop fortress that was the last stronghold of Jewish resistance to fall to the Romans in the year 74.
Masada was a natural hill fort on a cliff overlooking the Dead Sea. Directly opposite lay the wide peninsula called El Lisan—the Tongue—with the town of Mazra in its eastern crook and its northernmost tip given the unlikely name of Cape Costigan. The gap between our bank and the peninsula, however, was as I remembered: a bit far for mules to swim and, according to the depth lines sketched onto the water, too deep to wade.
“Will we go around the south to get to Mazra?” I asked.
“Too slow,” grunted Mahmoud.
“We swim, then?” I asked brightly, and added in English, “What jolly fun.”
The facetious remark was too much for Mahmoud. “That will not be necessary,” he growled repressively, and sent me to unhobble the mules.
It was a bare twenty map miles from the previous night’s comfortless camp, but it was late afternoon when we reached the vicinity of Masada. The climb down the cliffs was too precarious to risk the legs of the mules in the dark. Ali again pulled his vanishing act, hurling himself down the precipitous path to the sea, leaving the tents and cook fire to us.
I briskly followed Ali’s example. Before I could be handed a water-skin or a handful of tent pegs, I made my own escape, in the opposite direction.
I approached Masada from the high ground and made my way up the remains of the ramp that the Romans had used in their final assault on the fortress of rebels. Once inside the walls, I crossed the deserted plateau to stand with the last rays of the sun on my back, gazing down at the Roman camp and the